Hastily and tenderly he bound the handkerchief round the sightless eyes. Having done so, he said to the nurse with unintentional quotation from the Gospel of St. John, and a sad irony: “Let there be light.”
It all gave him time to pull himself together and prepare for the moment when he must tell Ingolby the truth. In one sense the sooner it was told the better, lest Ingolby should suddenly discover it for himself. Surprise and shock must be avoided. So now he talked in his low, soothing voice, telling Ingolby that the operation had put him out of danger, that the pain now felt came chiefly from the nerves of the eye, and that quiet and darkness were necessary. He insisted on Ingolby keeping silent, and he gave a mild opiate which induced several hours’ sleep.
During this time Rockwell prepared himself for the ordeal which must be passed as soon as possible; gave all needed directions, and had a conference with the assistant Chief Constable to whom he confided the truth. He suggested plans for preserving order in excited Lebanon, which was determined to revenge itself on Manitou; and he gave some careful and specific instructions to Jowett the horse-dealer. Also, he had conferred with Gabriel Druse, who had helped bear the injured man to his own home. He had noted with admiration the strange gentleness of the giant Romany as he, alone, carried Ingolby in his arms, and laid him on the bed from which he was to rise with all that he had fought for overthrown, himself the blind victim of a hard fate. He had noticed the old man straighten himself with a spring and stand as though petrified when Ingolby said: “Why don’t you turn on the light?” As he looked round in that instant of ghastly silence he had observed almost mechanically that the old man’s lips were murmuring something. Then the thought of Fleda Druse shot into Rockwell’s mind, and it harassed him during the hours Ingolby slept, and after the giant Gipsy had taken his departure just before the dawn.
“I’m afraid it will mean more there than anywhere else,” he said sadly to himself. “There was evidently something between those two; and she isn’t the kind to take it philosophically. Poor girl! Poor girl! It’s a bitter dose, if there was anything in it,” he added.
He watched beside the sick-bed till the dawn stared in and his patient stirred and waked, then he took Ingolby’s hand, grown a little cooler, in both his own. “How are you feeling, old man?” he asked cheerfully. “You’ve had a good sleep-nearly three and a half hours. Is the pain in the head less?”
“Better, Sawbones, better,” Ingolby replied cheerfully. “They’ve loosened the tie that binds—begad, it did stretch the nerves. I had gripes of colic once, but the pain I had in my head was twenty times worse, till you gave the opiate.”
“That’s the eyes,” said Rockwell. “I had to lift a bit of bone, and the eyes saw it and felt it, and cried out-shrieked, you might say. They’ve got a sensitiveness all their own, have the eyes.”
“It’s odd there aren’t more accidents to them,” answered Ingolby—“just a little ball of iridescent pulp with strings tied to the brain.”
“And what hurts the head may destroy the eyes sometimes,” Rockwell answered cautiously. “We know so little of the delicate union between them, that we can’t be sure we can put the eyes right again when, because of some blow to the head, the ricochet puts the eyes out of commission.”
“That’s what’s the matter with me, then?” asked Ingolby, feeling the bandage on his eyes feverishly, and stirring in his bed with a sense of weariness.